Tell you all about 12 mobile learning fundamentals is definitely easier than going through the 12 labours of Hercules. Indeed, mobile learning is nowadays on every tongue, or rather in any pocket!
And for good reasons! Let those clear, inflexible stats enlighten you!
- The number of mobile phone users to reach almost 5.3 billion in 2017! Statista
- By 2016, use of mobile apps will surpass that of Internet domain names, making mobile apps the dominant means of engaging with brands. Gartner
- 70% of professionals will partly work from their personal smartphone or tablet by 2018! capterra
- 85% of organizations’ CEOs now understand the worth of mobile learning and claim to have a mobile learning strategy in place or in construction. Skillsoft
- Mobile Learning today reaches a $5.3 billion dollar industry and is predicted to reach $12.2 billion in 2017! Ambient Insight
- Mobile Learning tools see wide adoption, with 74% of trainees using them while on the road. 52% even use them in bed either before sleep or right after waking up. Michaels and Associates
But why organizations, training agencies and learners are nowadays all seekers of mobile learning technology?
Here are 12 assumptions, the choice is yours!
1. Access. A mobile learning environment is about access to content, peers, credible sources, and previous studies on relevant topics. It can be updated via a smartphone, iPad or laptop, but access is continuous – learner handles the training independently.
2. Asynchronous. A powerful benefit of mobile learning is the asynchronous access, moving the educational environment from the office/school floor to “anywhere and anytime”. It also enables a personalized learning experience: just in time, just enough, just for me.
3. Blended. A mobile learning environment usually mixes with physical training, personalized communication and digital interaction.
4. Cloud. The cloud enables “sly” mobility. With access to the cloud, all data sources and project materials are continuously available, allowing for previously unreachable revisions and collaboration.
5. Curation. Apps and mobile devices not only support curation, these technologies also adapt to learners and connect them, store files, publish thinking, making curation a matter of process rather than ability.
6. Gamified. Play is a primary characteristic of progressive learning, a cause and effect of a motivated mind. In a mobile learning environment learners are experiencing multiple activities and stakeholders, turning the learning style from academic and compliant to personal and playful.
7. Markers. Diverse real-time measures of understanding and assiduity are available to follow-up on learners’s continuous progression.
8. Offline… but online. Mobile learning is iterated and recursive. There is a continuous access to information, an ongoing cognitive thinking, and globalized function through mobile devices. It is embedded in communities capable of straight interactions with learners (e-mails, push notifications…).
9. Sundry. With mobility comes multiplicity. As learning environments continuously evolve, flexibility becomes a norm that provides new ideas, unpredicted challenges and opportunities for revision and real life assessments. Audiences are diverse, as are the environments data is being collected from and distributed to.
10. Tailored. Here, learners plan topic, sequence, audience, and application thanks to profiling activities or teachers who act as resource and assessment experts.
11. Transparent. Transparency is a natural derivative of mobility and collaboration. As planning, thinking, performance, and reflection are both mobile and digital, they gain an immediate audience with numerous interrelated communities via social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook…
12. Genuine. The above 11 assumptions convey genuineness to learning, hardly reproducible in a classroom. Learning becomes a unique personalized experience.
Which of these assumptions do you feel is the most applicable to you?
Diplômée d’école de commerce et passionnée par les innovations du numérique, Noémie a enfilé son scaphandre et rejoint l’équipe Teach on Mars au poste de Content Manager. Elle intervient en marketing et événementiel tout en contribuant à Teach on Earth, une initiative sociale et environnementale.
